Millions of media items are published on a daily basis, but only a relative handful become wildly popular. The popularity of a media item (or “media content”) can be related to how many different places it is published and how frequently it is posted, forwarded, marked as important or otherwise shared by users. Extensive sharing of a media item can benefit from the so-called “network effect,” whereby a person can share a media item with several friends, each of whom can share it with several friends and so on. A media item that is widely shared and gains a high degree of popularity due to the network effect is said to have gone “viral,” and may be called a “viral media item.